This is Five Minute Friday episode number 58: Conferences.
Hello hello and welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. You may have noticed that my voice is still gone and yeah, it’s coming back slowly, but we’ll get there. The other thing you may have noticed is that our guest this week, Ryan Compton – I really hope you enjoyed that episode, but what I was alluding to is that you may have noticed that I met Ryan at a conference, at the Open Data Science Conference, which was in Boston in May this year.
And you will actually notice this pattern. The next few guests that are going to be on the show, most of them I met at this Open Data Science Conference, and that’s why I wanted to bring this whole notion of attending conferences and data science events live up with you today. So let’s take a moment to pause and think, when was the last time you attended a conference? If it was in the past 6 months, you’re doing great. If it was in the past year but not 6 months, you’re doing good. But if it was more than a year, if it was in the past 2 years, you’re doing ok, but if it was more than 2 years ago, then it’s something you should look into. And I’ll explain why.
As data scientists, we do a lot of work in front of computers, we learn a lot, we study, we even interact with each other a lot through forums, through things like stackoverflow, stackexchange, and other forums online. Quora, for example, you can post a question, people answer you. Or through SuperDataScience, through Udemy. So they are ways to interact. But at the same time, we very often lack that real life interaction with each other. And yes, you might say you interact with people at work. And that’s a good argument, but at the same time, the people you interact with at work, I can guess that they’re most likely the same people over and over again. Unless you’re working in consulting, where you’re probably interacting with new people all the time, which is great, but they’re clients. It’s a better situation, but still not ideal.
So the advantages of going to a conference, and my whole idea today is to encourage you to look up a conference and schedule something in your calendar, and commit to going to a conference some time in the future, some time in the coming months or at least some time this year if you haven’t been yet. So the advantages of conferences are multiple. But probably one of the main ones is not even the talks, not even the presentations that you see. It’s not just about learning, going to conferences to learn. Even though yes, you do get some of that, you get some interesting things that you can learn, but it’s more about the interaction with the people. So if you see an interesting speaker, then you go and talk to them, and you find out more ideas from them, and so on. And it really puts you out of your comfort zone in terms of the breadth of knowledge that is available out there.
Because data science ultimately is a very broad topic, we all know that, there’s visualisation, there’s modelling, there’s databases, there’s business intelligence, there’s presentation, there’s statistics, there’s programming, there’s so many different areas of data science, and inevitably, in what you’re doing for work, you’re most likely operating in a very narrow, maybe you go very deep into some area, but you’re usually quite narrow in terms of what you’re doing. Or even if it’s not narrow, even if you’re doing a whole suite of data science operations, or data science parts of the journey, at the same time, you are very likely – there are still areas which you are not touching upon.
And when you go to a conference, you really get put out of your comfort zone. You get to experience these through other people’s eyes, you see what’s new, what’s going on in the field, and you get to interact with those people, which is very important and you never know to what these interactions can lead. They can lead to a business opportunity, they could lead to a new job, they could lead to just a friendship, they could lead to career growth, or just personal growth as well. So it’s always a great thing that you can get through these interactions.
Plus you get to see what else is out there in the field of data science, where it’s going, and it’s good to refresh your knowledge so you don’t stagnate, so you don’t become a technological dinosaur. Even though you’re doing work, the world is moving further ahead, and not because you don’t want to, but just because you don’t have that food for thought, you are not able to come up with new ideas. It’s like your mind is hungry. It requires information. It requires new ideas all the time. You’ve got to feed it.
And one way of feeding it is continuously doing things that you are used to doing, or searching in areas where you’re used to searching. Another way is going to a conference and finding out, “oh, ok, that’s really cool,” some completely new ideas which are completely left field for you, you would have never thought of them yourself.
That’s how inspired I got by the ODSC conference, and a huge thank you to Seamus, the CEO of ODSC, for organising it, and hopefully we’ll get him on the podcast some time soon as well, to talk about the conference, and just talk about some interesting things that he’s had in his life, but regardless of which conference you go to, it doesn’t have to be ODSC, there’s lots, there’s really lots of data science conferences out there, especially if you’re living in the Bay Area somewhere, or on the East Coast of the US as well. There’s lots of data science conferences out there. Just pick something that’s interesting to you, that maybe suits your schedule, and get out of your comfort zone. That’s my challenge for you for this year. Try to get onto a conference. You know what? Don’t try. Just get to a conference some time this year and you will thank yourself for it.
And on that note, I hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead, and I’ll see you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
